Why do you bother?

[TheWhisper]

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[Zaq]

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it's the biggest game in town. Roleplaying is a social activity, after all, and the more people there are with whom you can play (and/or discuss what you're playing), the better off you tend to be.

That's certainly not the only reason, but it counts for a heck of a lot.

[Serpentine]

Anything you can think of, you can do with D&D3.5. If it can't, you can make it do it. Everything you list as being awful about it? I don't give a damn about that.
Maybe when I have a chance to try them, I'll like others more. For now, D&D's great for my purposes.

[Godskook]

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Since you make no mention of pre-3.5 editions, I'm going to just point out that Gygax's involvement with 3.5 is much akin to Moses' involvement with writing the New Testament.

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Because 3.5 is a freaking *AWESOME* game. It is. Just absolutely fantastic. Its hard to nail down why that is, but it is so.

What's more, the kinks you mentioned? They're *EASY* to fix. Like, really easy. Pun-pun is shut down by houseruling the Sarukh, while the Twice-Betrayer is a tad lame without metamagic abuse, and his most required feat(Initiate of Mystra) is likely banned at most tables.

I came to 3.5 *VERY* late in the cycle, fell in love, and I'm going to stick with it for a while. I know the rule-set, and I love the modularity(read: lego-ness) of the system that can't be found in a lot of other games.

[Yahzi]

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Actually, 2e was a pretty good imitation of Vance's style in "The Dying Earth."

I have been asking myself why I bother with 3e, but then I went and solved a bunch of the problems you brought up, so it's not quite so bad. The solution is simple: XP is tangible. Check out my sig if you want to see why that fixes everything.

Anway, the reason to stay is becuase D&D has a particular flavor (for instance, spell-casting armor-wearing fighting priests are AFAIK unique to D&D). Also, of course, people already know it, which helps a lot.

[Galileo]

I think that the lego-y modularity of 3.5 is definitely one of its greatest strengths, as Godskook said. With a bit of thought and time, you can homebrew your own... anything. I've tried homebrewing for other systems, and to be honest, I had a much harder time coming up with ways to do so.

Sure, most of that is simply the amount of time I've put into each system, but dammit, I spent those hours reading all the splatbooks, I'm not gonna abandon it just cause someone tells me it's not as well balanced as newer RPGs. I know that, I'd be a fool not to. But I'm comfortable with D&D for now, so I'll keep playing it. And finding a community to discuss it is a lot easier.

[Cespenar]

The brokenness of the system means little %99 of the time if you're playing with actually reasonable people (who you should play the game with after all).

[Xiander]

Two things.

1) If you pitch a game concept well enough i would play it in any damn system, and probably manage to have fun.

2) I find it amusin to fool around with 3.5 to see how far i can stretch it. I am not skillfull enough to outright break it, thank god.

[AyeGill]

To me, roleplaying systems is not a matter of divided camps, of choosing one over the other, as you make it seem. The way you put it, it sounds like you can't both play DnD with your DnD playing buddies, and play other systems with your other systems playing buddies. Why not?

I know some people who only know DnD, so obviously i play DnD with them. And the great community doesn't hurt either. But playing with those people, and being a part of the community, doesn't prohibit me from playing exalted with other people, and participating in a Shadowrun or World of Darkness one-shot once in a while.

RPG systems are not mutually exclusive.

[molten_dragon]

Why do I play D&D?

Because it's fun! Despite all its pitfalls (and it does have a lot) D&D is a fun game to play. Sure, other games are fun too, but D&D is the biggest game in town, and it's much easier to find players for. So I play it.

[KillianHawkeye]

Short answer: Because it's D and frikkin D!

[FelixG]

I will play most game systems.

I prefer 3.5 though as its simple, modular and fun.

When you play with people more focused on fun and not trying to "win" at the game the tier levels and what not really dont matter as much.

[faceroll]

To me, roleplaying systems is not a matter of divided camps, of choosing one over the other, as you make it seem. The way you put it, it sounds like you can't both play DnD with your DnD playing buddies, and play other systems with your other systems playing buddies. Why not?

Because organizing 4+ people to play is hard enough, but organizing 8+ people, and going to school, making money to pay the bills, researching my master's thesis, ice climbing, sca, and girls? There's just not enough time.

[FelixG]

Because organizing 4+ people to play is hard enough, but organizing 8+ people, and going to school, making money to pay the bills, researching my master's thesis, ice climbing, sca, and girls? There's just not enough time.

Thats why you let someone else do the organization and you just attend, take some time from ice climbing or SCA to do so. Both of those are recreational activities so you could replace them with a slightly more relaxed recreational activity

[JBento]

D&D is not the only broken system. I can bend GURPS over my knee and spank it madly with 5minutes toying around with the rulebook (I never played the others you mentioned). Both the broken builds you pointed out, btw, never enter in my games, simply by the fact that I don't use Retar, er Forgotten Realms material.

But seriously, GURPS is way more broken than D&D - the more modular a system is, the easier it is to break, simply by the fact that it gives more options to combine. GURPS character point total means absolutely squat, even less than level means in D&D (and at D&D, you can do a second power calibration by tier - though there is no accounting for player skill, just like in any system).

GURPS is an awesome system, mind you. It's just no holy grail of balance.

[DwarfFighter]

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I don't know about you, but my players aren't constantly trying to break the game. We're just having a good time hacking monsters and taking their loot. For this the 3.5 system works great.

-DF

[AyeGill]

Because organizing 4+ people to play is hard enough, but organizing 8+ people, and going to school, making money to pay the bills, researching my master's thesis, ice climbing, sca, and girls? There's just not enough time.

Well, obviously, if you have that little spare time/that much other spare time stuff you'd rather do than RPGs, you have to prioritize. Me, i find that i have enough spare time on my hands, or at least enough stuff that i'd prioritize below RPGs, that i can make room for a couple groups. of course, it depends on how often you play, too(For us, it's about once a moth for both my exalted and my DnD group). And, as was said, it takes a lot less time when you're the player and only have to attend.

[Thurbane]

I don't know about you, but my players aren't constantly trying to break the game. We're just having a good time hacking monsters and taking their loot. For this the 3.5 system works great.

-DF

This...very much this.

I've been playing 3.X D&D for about 5 years now, and the brokenness issues I so often read about on forums really haven't crept up in our regular games. Sure, I can see the potential, but in a relatively low op, beer n pretzels group with a "gentleman's agreement" about not using obviously broken things, we're golden.

I played 1E and 2E for around 20 years before that, and they also had their share of balance issues and nonsensical rules. I also throughly enjoyed playing them.

[nedz]

I've played most version of this game, and they all have different foibles. That is they can all be broken, albeit in different ways.
I've only played GURPS once, and I broke it effortlessly with my first character.

The issue is the balance between Realism and Heriosm.
Realistic games cannot be broken any more than you can break real life.
As soon as you make a game Heroic then you have a broken reality.

Trouble is: Heroic games are more fun.

The only was to limit the 'damage' is to play at lower levels, but actually players seem to like the brokeness - despite their protestations.

In the original game (I'm talking about the three little books here) characters could not advance beyond 6th level simply because the rules did not exist. As soon as you go beyond this point you start to leave the Fantasy Normality of litriture and begin to enter the Gygaxian Tippyverse.
It is no suprise to me that people who prefer their games to be more like the fantasy books they have read; play low magic systems such as E6.

[Tyndmyr]

Anything you can think of, you can do with D&D3.5. If it can't, you can make it do it. Everything you list as being awful about it? I don't give a damn about that.
Maybe when I have a chance to try them, I'll like others more. For now, D&D's great for my purposes.

While this is trivially true, that is true for every system. Yes, you can theoretically play cyberpunk with 3.5, but almost everything you used would be custom.

D&d is solid for epic fantasy, pre firearms. Anything beyond that requires signifigant mods or is much better done by another system.

The big reason everyone plays d&d is the same reason everyone plays wow, network effects. Rpgs make poor solo games, and people are often reluctant to learn new things.

[Serpentine]

Maybe, but it's my understanding - based purely on what other people have said, as my experience is limited - that D&D3.5 is unusually easy to modify, recreate and build with in comparison with most other systems.

[AslanCross]

Frankly, the balance of issues, while glaring on paper, do not necessarily appear in practice. They certainly haven't happened in my games.

[The Rose Dragon]

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Gygax was not bad at game design. Outdated, maybe, compared to today's knowledge, but far better than what WotC did in 3rd Edition and 3.5. If I had the books, I would still play 2nd Edition, while I will likely never play 3rd Edition ever again. So, really, why do I bother? I don't! I am fairly good at getting people offline to play new systems if they play RPGs at all, and most of my gaming happens online, so the popularity of D&D really doesn't affect me much.

[Mastikator]

Personally I don't bother. But it's not for balance reasons. I'm just not a fan of the level/class system.

[Totally Guy]

I think that D&D is popular because it's popular.

I think there are plenty of things that have this property. It's like language and money.

If you were the lone speaker of a language it would be effectively useless. If you had the only telephone in the world who would you call? If you invented the Giant in the Playground Florin as a brand new currency... Well you'd probably have a hard time buying things with them.

All these ideas get better and better when more people agree with them and invest in them.

D&D compared to a lot of well designed RPG systems is the same. D&D is a well spread language with all it's quirks and flaws (much like English). Other games are a little known tongue. So which on do you pick? Which will be give the best reward for the least investment? D&D will.

[Emmerask]

D&D3.5 is unusually easy to modify, recreate and build with in comparison with most other systems.

That is absolutely true, it has its limits but within those it is very easy to change stuff or add new content all thanks to its modular structure.

And as far as the ability to break the game goes, even todays "modern" systems are all quite easy to break if you take some time.

The ability to break a game is just a byproduct of having a lot of options, the more options the more breakable.
The only system you will find that are (nearly) "unbreakable" are those which put you in a straitjacket not allowing you anything...
I much rather deal with the occasional breaking of the game (which I then can rule 0) then to deal with a game without options

[Saph]

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Well, because it's not the dark ages of gaming. Your list of complaints is fairly inaccurate, after all.

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Because you like putting on a performance, would be my guess.

[Foryn Gilnith]

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Skill > Build > Class. Novices fail the first part. They're also likely to fail the second.

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Yes, but there's yet another point where we have to wonder why we care so much that the emperor is naked. The emperor is naked, Mystra is overpowered, sarrukhs are ridiculous, psionics is sloppily written, cats are overpowered. But why not look at the emperor's public policy? Why not look at 3.5 in action instead of quibbling about your distaste for alignment?

What's your point?
Is it the question you asked, Why do people play D&D? I personally can't cite anything worthwhile. Habit, I guess; I've played 3.5 for long enough that I'm comfortable with it. I could claim other things like ubiquity, but at this point 3.5 isn't exactly an overwhelming majority of games, especially on the internet.
If your point is something like "learn other systems", I agree completely. But if your point is something like "stop playing D&D", I'd have to say that a lot of your post is hyperbole and aesthetic quibbles. That's no criticism of your argument; I find that a lot of rhetoric is like that, and in your textwall you hit upon several very valid and painful points (e.g. CR, magic not affecting society). But a lot of the points you raise seem to be, IMO, simply the result of your personal sensibilities, calibrated to more "modern" systems, seeing things that 3.5 merely does differently and lumping them in with things it legitimately does poorly.

[The Big Dice]

I don't play 3.5 anymore. After buying 30+ sourcebooks and who knows how much time and money invested, I realised something that I already knew before I bought into it in such a big way: D&D is rubbish. It's overly complicated, full of all kinds of stupid restrictions on classes, skills and feats. It's a throwback to an era of gaming that died of natural causes 20 years ago.

Why do you think the retro clone movement is so popular? People are harking back to the 'good old days' of their roleplaying experience.

People talk of D&D as being modular, but it really isn't. You have classes, levels, skills, feats and spells. Add on a combat system and there's the game. You can't take any of those modules out without making the rest of the game cease to function. Except maybe Feats. Or spells.

Having things to choose from when you make a character doesn't make the game modular. It means there are things to choose from when you make your character.

People talk about D&D as being heroic and epic. Except I don't see acts of heroism taking place in D&D games. I see people wandering off to ind things to kill and stuff to steal. That's not heroic. Where is the sacrifice? Where is the altruism, boldness and daring? All I see is greed and a desire for the next toy.

People talk abot D&D being epic. Except it's really not. Powerful doesn't mean epic. Epic is as much about scope as it is scale. Like genius or classic, it's one of those words that has been used so much that it has lost it's meaning. All I know is, there's not much difference between the stuff a 1st level and a 31st level D&D character does. Except the travel is to weirder places and the monsters are bigger.

What D&D is, and has been for as long as I've been gaming, is the gateway drug of the RPG world. When I started gaming, the path usually went: (A)D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, Marvel Super Heroes, then on to other more exotic games like Palladium or RoleMaster.

Now it's so much easier to find new games to have a try of. There's reviews of all kinds of stuff on RPGnet. There are free game, there's print on demand, traditional FLGS, mail order from all kinds of places. The options are endless when it comes to trying out new games.

And even if you don't like something new and different after you gave it a try, there's nothing to stop you going back to D&D.

[Tengu_temp]

Maybe, but it's my understanding - based purely on what other people have said, as my experience is limited - that D&D3.5 is unusually easy to modify, recreate and build with in comparison with most other systems.

No more than any other system with loose connections between the setting and mechanics. And much less than systems actually designed to let you build anything, like GURPS or Mutants and Masterminds.

I don't play DND 3.5. It's too easy to break, characters who are not casters or ToB classes are too limited, there are too many relics of old game design such as rolling for HP - and it does not give me anything to make up for those flaws. For example, Exalted is ridiculously easy to break too, but it makes up for it with an awesome premise, setting, and freedom during character creation - which is why I like it, despite its flaws.